Ptolus: Monte Cook's City by the Spire

A full-color illustrated fantasy city sourcebook

Either in print or in PDF, Ptolus is the most deluxe and useful roleplaying product ever produced. This landmark fantasy setting offers an in-depth treatment of hundreds of city locales and characters straight from the 3rd Edition playtest campaign of Monte Cook, one of the system's designers. Inside these pages you'll find more than 350 fabulous illustrations and over 100 color maps, with new rules elegantly integrated with the d20 core rules. Ptolus was designed to offer optimum content and usability, with extensive cross referencing to help you navigate its pages with ease. This Big Book comes packed with enough source material and adventures to stand up to years of play and take a group of adventurers from level 1 all the way to level 20.

This high quality gaming resource offers more than 800 pages of source and adventure material from one of the industry's greatest designers: Monte Cook, codesigner of 3rd Edition D&D and author of the Dungeon Master's Guide. A fantasy city built above extensive dungeons beside the Spire of an ancient foe, Ptolus is a self-contained campaign -- or insert it into your home setting, if you prefer. Its unique design makes it the most DM-friendly book on your virtual bookshelf.

Ptolus was created by one of the architects of 3rd Edition for the gaming professionals in his group. Now you can make it yours!

The PDF version of Ptolus includes the Ptolus main book (671 pages) plus an expanded table of contents, search index, maps, map tiles and other goodies that expand it to an 808 page PDF. You also receive a host of supplemental titles, or digital extras, including The Banewarrens, Chaositech, The Night of Dissolution, Map Keys, two Campaign Journals, and more.

The print edition of Ptolus is full color, hardcover book. You will also receive the digital extras mentioned above for download. The premium edition is printed on a thicker paper stock and uses a different color printing press than the standard edition.

The full PDF + Print bundle contains everything: the PDF of the main book, the digital extras, and the printed hardcover.

I also would be interested in knowing the print quality and if the additional materials like the map and cd are included. Has anyone purchased one and found out?

Leslie WAugust 25, 2014 3:48 pm UTC

PURCHASER

How does the hardcover premium compare to the original printing? Are there notable differences? The original book was so beautiful... Also - does the premium hard cover include any of the additional materials (CD and map) that came with the first printing?

This immense campaign setting is better than I could imagine any urban and dungeon resource. I have it in hardcopy and now electronic form. The electronic form makes it perfect for reading anywhere, and for extracting pictures and maps. This is a 1st [...]

For years (during D&D 3.0 and 3.5) I followed Monte Cook and most of his work. But when D&D 4th edition was announce I lost interest and lost track of role playing games . . . until a few weeks ago when I read "Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better [...]

What can I say... this is an amazing product. I wish I had purchased a hard copy, back in the day, when that was an option. It has taken a while to even get a feel for the campaign/city. There is so much material and in great detail too. I'll [...]

It's pretty much impossible to describe all the goodness of this product in a short review—or even a long one. I have never seen any campaign setting--much less one that's really just a single city--presented with such great care and thoroughness. If [...]

Ptolus has completely reinvigorated my campaigns. There's so much material in this book, I don't think I'll ever fully exhaust it. It's become my favorite setting and I measure all other supplements to its high standards. Ptolus works well on its own [...]

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.